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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The first step to saving our civilization, at least in the sense that I care for it as a civilization, is not for tens of thousands of people to go kill the local subway-screaming bums. Lock them up? Maybe. Kill them? No.

Locking them up is an option for a political entity with a jail and a staff; it's not something an individual can do. Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force. It's a bad situation, but it's certainly not clear that making everyone put up with the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people is better for civilization than allowing direct action be taken against them.

Life doesn't work like that. You can't just have some kind of society-wide spree of murdering undesirables and find that somehow, all of the things that you actually like about liberal modernity have survived.

Are you sure? And even if not, maybe most people would prefer the aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill violent people dead over whatever they lose by that happening... perfection, after all, is rarely an option.

Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force.

Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.

I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.

You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.

One example I'd flag here is the Philippines, which amazingly has a lower per capita crime rate than the US and the UK, but which is VERY reliant on private security and community justice. The middle class live in gated communities, private security guards are everywhere, and justice is swiftly and pretty brutally implemented. Here is a really funny scene from the movie La Visa Loca where a British tourist gets his bag snatched by a thief. After he's arrested by private security guards, the British tourist is invited to beat the shit out of the guy before they call the police.

Another example - back when she was a teenager one of my Pinoy wife's friends was sexually assaulted in a Manila club. The next day her brothers and cousins had established the name of the guy, and went to his family and explained they were going to teach him a lesson. The guy's family basically agreed and they fixed the terms of the beatings (e.g., nothing that would leave him permanently disabled). A few hours later a dozen 20-something men jumped the guy as he was leaving work and kicked seven shades of shit out of him. Thus was justice done, and justice was perceived to have been done, and a precedent was enforced in the wider community.

Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.

Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.

100% agree. That's what really impressed me when I heard the story. It made it go from the kind of system that could lead to feuding to something like justice by-social-consensus.

This also leads to things like Duarte's War on Drugs, which includes, "In speeches made after his inauguration on June 30 of 2016, Duterte urged citizens to kill suspected criminals and drug addicts. He said he would order police to adopt a shoot-to-kill policy, and would offer them a bounty for dead suspects."

Definitely sounds outrageous to a Western audience, but most Filipinos I know loved Duterte (excluding FilAms with college degrees). None of them felt personally endangered by his policy, and they reckoned it was a success. I'll be honest, despite spending a couple of months in the Philippines most years, I don't have a good grip on whether Duterte 'succeeded' in his war on drugs, because in my time in the Philippines I saw basically zero evidence of drug use except an occasional joint being passed around at a party. Certainly nothing like the zombie hordes of San Francisco or Philadelphia. But culturally, the Philippines seems to have a really low tolerance for substance abuse; I always felt like an alcoholic when I was there, whenever I ordered a third beer and everyone else stopped at two. So perhaps there was a groundswell of support for wanting to aspire to Singaporean standards and nip the problem in the bud?

Leads to, or results from? I was under the impression the Philippines were high-crime until Duarte?

EDIT: Seems like he halved the crime rate?

India has pretty low crime, something I would also warrant is due to our extrajudicial punishment.

Thieves often get severely beaten up before the cops get there, and the latter happily turns a blind eye.

Frankly, I trust the community at large to police violent crimes themselves, having your ass handed to you makes your bad life decisions much more poignant than a stint in prison, especially for scum with low time preference.

The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.

And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.

Gangrapes and coverups are far less common than petty thieves and hooligans getting a beating or two, and if the former is the cost of minimizing the latter, I'll take it.

In the vast majority of cases, the person being beaten up isn't some poor bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time, but someone caught pickpocketing, trying to snatch purses and the like. Those don't make international news, whereas sectarian strife and rapes do, so the West had a grossly skewed perspective.

I don't know about the ancient world but the upshot of this was that in the medieval world the murder rate was ridiculously high by modern standards. I remember reading one article that estimated the murder rate for Oxford in the 14th century being well over 100 per 100,000 people while New York City at its most dystopian never cracked 30. Estimates of the overall American murder rate dropped from over 30 in 1700 to below 8 in 2020. By comparison, only the 5 most violent Mexican cities even approach the medieval Oxford murder rate, and the 1700 US rate is comparable with modern-day South Africa. The best that can be said about historical eras when law enforcement was decentralized was that it wasn't any more violent than the most violent places in the modern world, and that seems like damning with faint praise.

A huge confounder now is omnipresent surveillance. With cameras on every doorstep, every vehicle dash, every corner store, etc., it's bloody difficult to physically move to a place to murder someone without a camera catching you, your car, something. It's not always enough, but it is absolutely an incredible deterrent, at least to people who have other "regular life" equities that are a least a little bit important to them in comparison to the prospect of going to prison for most of the rest of their life.

I also wonder if the rise in surveillance is actually contributory to the rise in mass shootings. This is a completely fresh thought for me, so I'm just sort of throwing it out there. (Also, it's a small percentage of the overall issue, so the whole rest of this is pretty much just an aside.) The initial thought is just that omnipresent surveillance probably makes it vastly more difficult to be the type of serial killer we had decades ago (and presumably long in the past, too). You just can't bank on being undetectable by, like, picking up random victims at highway rest areas or whatever. Those rest areas have cameras now. The highways have automated license plate recognition, and they can correlate plates that were on the road near multiple incidents. Cell phones are constantly telling the telcos where you are, and that will also correlate you near multiple incidents. You can probably start trying to scheme your way through each one, but there are more and more and more. Many pieces of data, and you'd have to be incredibly meticulous to work your way through each problem in order to rack up a big body count over an extended period of time.

So, if you're a wannabe serial killer, but it's just too darn exhausting to think through how you can pull off more than a few before getting caught by the panopticon, maybe you just get funneled toward not doing it over an extended period of time. You don't do them individually, carefully, one-by-one, always hoping to not get caught on the next iteration. Instead, you give up on observability and simply try to get all your desired killing in as quickly as possible in one big streak.

In any event, I'm not sure we've experienced a combination of panopticon with decentralized law enforcement. Would probably result in some weird incentives.

that omnipresent surveillance probably makes it vastly more difficult to be the type of serial killer

CSI (and its later offshoots) unambiguously communicated to everyone alive at that time (everyone watched it or knew someone that did) that every police department had Sherlock Holmes capabilities.

Yeah, "zoom and enhance" was bullshit at the time, but people were largely ignorant of computer capabilities at the time (being that this was also pre-cellphone) and that was only a small part of the claimed capabilities of forensic science. And now those capabilities are increasingly the reality, so you get things like 1980s serial killers getting found out by DNA data they never even submitted.

Instead, you give up on observability and simply try to get all your desired killing in as quickly as possible in one big streak.

As a bonus for the new "parallel killers", you're guaranteed to be on every newspaper (TIME magazine made the Columbine killers a household name), your manifesto (or supposed manifesto) will be paraded around, and everyone in the nation will freak the fuck out.

We haven't quite figured out how to deal with that yet, since renting a truck and driving into a bunch of people is even easier and deadlier than guns are (the recent events in Texas should show that pretty clearly), and the fact that these acts are also fundamentally suicides complicates things even further.

Personally, I think we already hit upon the solution in the 70s and 80s with movie plots portraying 21st-century blood sports. It'd be a radical solution, of course, but if we can offer someone a guaranteed 15 minutes of fame and (the chance) to kill people for shits and giggles while at the same time crowding out the media attention current parallel killers receive I think it'd probably depress their numbers. Might lead to some really weird incentives, though.

Absolutely fair, but obviously hard to disentangle cause and effect here; the medieval era was desperately poor and ideologically fanatical by modern standards with an incredibly poorly educated population. I guess my main point was not that private justice systems are necessarily desirable from a niceness and human civilisation point of view, but merely that there are indeed stable equilibria involving them that don't immediately turn into the war of all against all. Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England that existed alongside high poverty and very low per-capita policing.

Also note Scott's discussion in his NRx explainer post about the bizarrely low crime rates in Victorian England

His first source is moldbug quoting some text where a guy just says something like 'We are secure, without crime! You can go out at night without anything bad happening', without much attempt to back that up! Elsewhere on his blog, moldbug has cited some other old texts that say similar things, but never any data, and ... firsthand reports of the vibe of a place like this are often wrong.* Scott then goes on to cite English crime data, and he just doesn't pick a graph that goes back far enough, even back in 2013 there were studies saying pre-1900s english crime rates were high.

*This is one thing I worry about with him, especially in the areas I agree with. He's reading a bunch of old books, coming to rather unusual conclusions, and then synthesizing that across hundreds of (area, period) combinations. It's really easy to make mistakes while doing that, as ... almost every failed grand narrative historical synthesis ever attests to. And I haven't seen many attempts at criticizing his ""historical scholarship"" either - which, if many existed but were bad, would make the claims more plausible.

To your main point - it's def correct that such equilibria exist, but even in your example, the process didn't seem to discriminate too much between 'the accused did something wrong' and 'the accused did nothing wrong but we have social power and want to beat him up'.

Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s

Low effort + sarcasm isn't a productive way to join the conversation.

The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system".

This only follows if governments run perfectly and have no principal/agent or other problems that prevent the will of the people from working.

And that only follows if there is broad public consensus that some people are human garbage who are undeserving of basic rights and that violence against them should be ignored provided it's executed with some broad excuse of having the "public interest" in mind. Something tells me that no such public consensus exists.

That's the case in India, and looking around, I don't see anything particularly wrong with the state of affairs when it comes to policing of violent crime or theft.

Seriously, you Westerners are spoiled, society doesn't breakdown overnight when common people beat up thieves, thugs or miscellaneous dirtbags, no matter how much you wring your hands afterwards.

Does it break down totally? No. Does it make it an undesirable place to live? I don't know, weren't you extolling the virtues of London a while back because you could walk down the street with your girlfriend without drawing the opprobrium of the community? I can't imagine how little it would take for one to be considered a "miscellaneous dirtbag" and thus subject to senseless beatings.

Once again, you're severely miscalibrated it you think a couple walking down the street is at any real risk of harm.

India itself supposedly frowns on PDA, yet my girl and I have gotten away with quite a bit.

There really are stable equilibria between anarcho-tyranny and fascism, and one would be that assholes committing significant crimes get their asses handed to them, while otherwise benign behavior or very mild offenses don't cause a ruckus.

Do you actually believe people have an obligation to respect iniquitous laws? Do you feel like a revolutionary when you jaywalk? The law is just a crude model and reminder of morality, of course it yields to it when they conflict. If I get to decide how everyone should act, I ask that they behave morally, not legally.

According to you, this is the reasoning of an antifa: ‘Man, it would obviously be the right thing to do to beat up those fash motte guys, that would really help the oppressed. I don’t care about the danger, or going to prison. What really stops me is the unspoken contract not to do anything illegal. My hands are tied because my enemies respect all the contracts between us. I could never knowingly break the rules of this in no way corrupt system I admire. Etc etc. ‘

Is your argument here that homicide laws are iniquitous?

Was your argument not that people should obey the law regardless of other considerations, lest it mean the end of the rule of the law, and possibly your own death?

Okay, you asked first. Yes, they are iniquitous.

Iniquitous in what way? How would you rewrite the homicide statutes to correct whatever iniquity you find there?

Those guys should be institutionalized for their repeated violations, but since they are released as soon as caught, it requires the creation of a new legal category to accommodate their deplorable presence in the public sphere: Let’s call them Prisoners on Parole.

“When robbed or assaulted by pops, citizens and cops may use all the force they deem necessary. “

So how do you define a PoP?

Someone incapable of obeying the law who nonetheless has not been incarcerated long-term.

Law-Abiding Citizens don't need to know someone is a PoP when interacting with them, but if they get in a fight with someone who turns out to be a PoP, nudge the presumption of innocence considerably in the LAC's favor.

How's that sound?

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Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up.

No, they can't. Demonstrably. Political systems turn out to be really hard to change by voting, since a vote both has little effect and that little effect covers a whole host of issues.

Your analogies miss on many salient points.

As I stated in another reply, you're operating from an assumption that there is broad consensus for the changes you seek. If that were the case, and it was only the pesky legislature whose intransigence prevented the necessary legislation from passing, you may have a point. But I doubt there's any social consensus to put a "the guy was a piece of shit" exception into the homicide laws. And even if there were, this is the system we have. If you think our system of government needs reform, then I'm all ears to you suggestions.

There's broad consensus for not wanting aggressive drug-addled mentally-ill homeless people in the subways. But you can't vote just for that.

But there's broad consensus against OP's implied solution.

Isn't the point here that the law enforcement system is too EASY to change by voting? Your DA's are politicians first, they get elected by people who are "soft on crime" therefore they are "soft on crime". Which they should be, if that is what they campaigned on.

Its not too difficult to impact law enforcement politics, its far too easy. Its too responsive to the whims of the public.

Isn't the point here that the law enforcement system is too EASY to change by voting?

No. Voters not paying enough attention so dedicated activists can elect soft-on-crime DAs is part of the problem, but only part. NYC has been doing nothing about the problem for far longer than Alvin Bragg has been in office.

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